It is a process, not a point in time, and it is not a process occurring everywhere at the same rate. All we have to date it are a few physical relics of early humans of types recognizably modern or closely related to the modern. Some of them almost certainly overlapped by more than 100,000 years the continuing life of other hominins. Some may represent false starts and dead ends, for human evolution must have continued to be highly selective. Though much faster than in earlier times, this evolution is still very slow; we are dealing with something that took place over perhaps 200,000 years in which we do not know when our fi rst true ‘ancestor’ appeared (though the place was almost certainly Africa). It is not ever easy to pose the right questions; the physiological and technical and mental lines at which we leave Homo erectus behind are matters of defi nition, and occurred during the many millennia that variants of that species and early specimens of Homo sapiens all lived on the earth.
The few early human fossils have provoked much argument. There is no doubt that men of a new type expanded into Eurasia in the warm period between two glacial eras from about 250,000 to 180,000 years ago, an age climatically so different from ours that elephants browsed in a semi- tropical Thames valley and hippopotami swam in the Rhine. The ‘Swanscombe’ skull, named after the place where it was found, shows its possessor to have had a big brain (about 1,300 cc) but in other ways not much to resemble modern man. It is likely that he represents a breed of Homo Heidelbergensis (named after the German city where remains were first found). These groups are descendants of some type of Homo erectus, and probably the ancestors of both the Neanderthals and ourselves (in their African forms). They spread fast throughout Africa and Eurasia, and reached levels of development not seen in earlier types of men. They were almost certainly the fi rst species that learnt to kindle fi re, with the momentous effects that had for humankind’s further development.
The next Ice Age then brings down the curtain. When it lifts, 130,000 or so years ago, in the next warm period, human remains again appear. There has been much argument about what they show but it is indisputable that there has been a great step forward. At this point we are entering a period where there is a fairly dense, though broken record. Creatures we can now call humans lived in Europe just over a hundred thousand years ago. There are caves in the Dordogne area which were occupied on and off for some 50 , 000years after that. The cultures of these peoples therefore survived a period of huge climatic change; the fi rst traces of them belong to a warm interglacial period and the last run out in the middle of the last Ice Age. This is an impressive continuity to set against what must have been great variation in the animal population and vegetation near these sites; to survive so long, such cultures must have been very resourceful and adaptive.
From Pithecus to Anthropos: Evolution of Homo Sapiens
